Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Gun shop:
• Sorry, no Disneyland for you:
A British Muslim family heading for Disneyland was barred from boarding a flight to Los Angeles by US authorities at London’s Gatwick airport amid concerns of an American overreaction to the perceived terrorist threat.
US Department of Homeland Security officials provided no explanation for why the country refused to allow the family of 11 to board the plane even though they had been granted travel authorization online ahead of their planned 15 December flight.
Senior politicians have been drawn into the case, warning that a growing number of British Muslims are being barred from the US without being told the reason for their exclusion.
• Some winter wonderland photos for you from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:
• Pentagon ridiculously claims it has killed 20,000 ISIS/Daesh fights—and just 6 civilians: In the 17 months since it started bombing ISIS and other jihadist organizations in Syria and Iraq, the US military has conducted more than 8,600 air strikes and dropped 28,000 bombs. It reports killing 20,000 ISIS members, while causing just six civilian deaths, including those of three children—a claim that groups watching the conflict say is a gross undercount. The Pentagon's civilian casualty figure is dwarfed by those of widely cited monitoring groups that tally casualties from the conflict in Syria. They claim that a more accurate count of non-combatant deaths from US-led air strikes is well into the hundreds.
• The Washington Post removes cartoon depicting Ted Cruz’s daughters as monkeys: The cartoon, drawn by Pulitzer prize-winner Ann Telnaes, showed Cruz, wearing cowboy boots and a Santa outfit, as an organ grinder, while his 4- and 7-year-old daughters are shown as dancing monkeys. It was drawn after Cruz appeared in a campaign ad telling Christmas stories to his daughters. The cartoon was removed after Cruz blasted the Post on Twitter for making “fun of my girls””
“Classy. @washingtonpost makes fun of my girls. Stick w/ attacking me--Caroline & Catherine are out of your league,” Cruz tweeted.
• Hikers meet President Obama on the Koko Head trail in Hawaii.
• No media time for you. Michael Punke, author of the novel made into The Revenant, the new DiCaprio film, can’t be interviewed. In fact he couldn’t even be found when the film opened:
He was 10,000 miles away in Nairobi, putting the finishing touches on an international trade agreement enacting a $1.3 trillion trade deal covering GPS devices, semiconductors and touch screens. Punke, 51, may be having the literary moment of a lifetime—more than a decade after his novel was released to high praise but modest sales—but as the deputy U.S. trade representative and ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Switzerland, he’s missing out on a lot of the fun.
In fact, he wasn’t even allowed to talk about “The Revenant” for this article. Federal ethics rules prohibit him from doing any side work—even a little promotional campaign—that might enrich him and potentially abuse his high-ranking office in the process.
• Alpine ski racer Marcel Hirscher almost clobbered by falling drone during a World Cup race Tuesday night.
• GDP growth for third quarter reduced to 2 percent: The figure, released by the U.S. Commerce Department Tuesday, is actually a bit better than the 1.9 percent seasonally adjusted growth a consensus of experts predicted would be the case. Growth of the U.S. economy since January 2011 has also been 2 percent.
On “today’s” Kagro in the Morning show, it’s our 12/29/14 episode! Greg Dworkin rounded up the NYPD crisis, MTV & teen birthrates, news fails, and, Obama: lame duck or honey badger? White dudes roam WalMart with BB guns & live! A TX Xmas story. Is "Pants on Fire" strong enough?
Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!